Urban Exploration in the Ragged Kingdom

Ragged Kingdom Closing Party

Artist and anarchist Jamie Reid, perhaps best known for his work with the Sex Pistols, is currently exhibiting a retrospective of his work at Temple Works in Leeds. The exhibition is on until the July 14th closing with an evening of experimental music and art curated by the Urban Exploration collective.

Interview with Jamie Reid
Urban Exploration Page

Urban Exploration will present a 4 hour epic set involving collaborative improv with Oliver Knight (spoken word), Jenny Komowsky (classical singing), Rowan Reid (singer/songwriter), Umcorps (modular synthesist), and a Navajo indian spirit dancer….all with a backdrop of tipis, interactive visuals and the largest reverb room ever!

More info on this event from Temple Works

Who’s George? Find out on the final night of Jamie Reid’s Ragged Kingdom at Temple.Works.Leeds, July 14, 7:00 pm – 1:00 am.

A fundraiser for St George’s Crypt homeless shelter in memory of our much loved porter Brian Bird (1959 – 2012), the night will see Jamie himself back at Temple.Works.Leeds.  An evening of extraordinary experiences will include experimental electronic ambient collective Urban Exploration collaborating with an opera singer, a poet, a singer songwriter (Jamie’s daughter Rowan), a hip-hop mc and a modular synthesist, and an acoustic set by Brian’s friends the Urban Stage Band – moving  from the Joiners bar into the Open Loading bay for a night of sound, light and …dancing by our surprise guest, Dennis Lee Rogers, the Spirit Dancer of the Navajo Nation in proximity to Jamie’s immense tipis which form part of his ongoing work around the Eightfold year. Celebrated dancer, artist and educator, Dennis met Jamie Reid in 1998 while on tour in U.K and returned to open Ragged Kingdom.in London in October 2011  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q2Impc6pM8. Jamie’s piece Corporate Slavery currently hung in the Joiner’s Bar Main Gallery Space features Dennis himself.

Facebook Event Page

Urban Exploration – Subterranean

Urban Exploration’s debut release is out now on If The Kids records in Berlin. The EP is available from various online record shops including iTunes, Juno, Amazon and Beatport.

You can get the release here.

If you are taking part in the Black March protest, don’t worry, we will be posting this again in April, just wait till then 😉

Here are some previews of the release:

Urban Expo 1

Urban Exposition 1

Improvised music by Urban Exploration with Live visuals.

 

Urban Exploration Live Jam

Practicing hard for their debut performance at  Bridgnorth Music and Arts festival the Urban Exploration Collective have recorded this live improvised set.

Urban Exploration Live Debut

The whole collective have been busy preparing a monster setup of modular synths, drum machines, laptops, tape echoes, stomp boxes and miles of cable for their live debut as a performing group, at this year’s Bridgnorth Music and Arts Festival.

They will also be curating a whole day of experimental electronica and whole night of banging techno at the festival:

More information on the festival

Here is sneak preview from one of their early practices…

Depot by Urban Exploration

Headcleaner @ Rephlex Night

Headcleaner’s awesome improvisation with a modular synth of his own creation! Easily the best thing at 20 years of Braindance, showing the old skool how it’s done basically. This is next level shit 😉

MisinforMation Review

The first time I watched this DVD I was pretty stoned. One of my favourite pastimes is to put on a film, one with great pictures and no dialogue such as Koyaanisqatsi, or some old Buster Keaton movies, skin up a large one, and provide my own soundtrack to the visuals out of my sizable collection of electronic music. As the psychotropic compound hits the cannabinoid receptors in the back of my brain and takes hold, pictures and sounds become one, rhythm becomes serendipitous, and my senses and imagination work together to re-contextualise this information in any way they see fit.
Intracellular signal transduction pathways are activated! I drift off into my own reverie, the images become blurred, the sound becomes muffled, and I pass out on my bean-bag, fully satisfied by this waking dream. With MisinforMation it feels like the Baron Mordant has done much the same thing, except he has managed to stay conscious long enough to write some original music, bespoke for the occasion.

I decided to watch the DVD again, this time with a clear head. The box doesn’t give you much information to be misguided by, though I’ve now worked out that the DVD is a collaboration between the BFI and Mordant Music, edited and re-scored by the latter, using the former’s access to the archives of the Central Office of Information – the UK government’s marketing and communications agency, and producer of public information films.

Pressing play you are greeted with a stark looking menu with the cryptic option to view “Spools” or to “Spore All” – I chose the latter. You are flung head-first into a Hitchcockian nightmare-vision of invading magpies, which quickly reveals itself to be a crime prevention commercial, extolling the virtues of Neighbourhood Watch. The sound is synthetic and ominous, the mood disquieting. This sets the tone if not the main themes of MisinforMation from the outset, a work that is as interested in the mechanics and language of film, as it is with the content. Indeed, the frequent use of test cards, countdowns and grainy damaged reels, conveys a love for the textural quality of the medium, and how that can effect the mood and feel of the images, as much as the themes and narratives displayed therein.

The Baron Mordant’s score emphasises this devil in the ambiguous detail. It is his music which becomes the constant thread, tying disparate pieces together. As many of the visual sources are from the 1970s and 80s, the nods to Vangelis and Eno seem highly appropriate – but it isn’t another retro pastiche. The sounds are pulled apart and elongated to form textures and drones. While at times it is Hauntological in the manner of Ghost Box or Boards of Canada, often the synths and effects are more akin to Autechre or Merzbow, noise and ambience are intense and lift the images to another plane. All works well until the Baron attempts a song – a somewhat naive blip on an otherwise flawless electronic score.

All the short films collated here are highly watchable, and interesting historical objects in their own right – but in MisinforMation they are re-purposed, obfuscated and altered – the new interpretation provided by sound alone. They are shown in a new light and this has a big impact on their semantic purpose. This is the main concept behind the project – that with only slight deviations from the original context, the meaning can be completely transformed. Sometimes this works better than others.

A Dark Social Template is particularly effective.  The new soundtrack casts a bleak re-imagining of our past’s visions for the future, playing on our informed position of knowing exactly how certain ideas would end up failing. The concrete mazes and dungeons of 1960s new builds are underscored by itchy, nervous, analogue bleeps and tones, highlighting the inhumanity of such places – while the original film, blissfully unaware of their future failure, tries to persuade poor sods to up-sticks and move there. Animated sections in the film are rendered surreal, with human behaviour made to look alien and viral, cities emerge like infected wounds on the earth’s skin. A beat-less disco makes the revelers look like absurd maniacs and re-interprets an OAP’s conga-line as some bizarre satanic ritual. The only part of this piece that didn’t capture my imagination was watching the presenters talking without the original audio. It was as if I had turned the sound down on my own TV, and this made it feel a bit amateurish when compared with the perfect wedding of music to picture in the other scenes. This is executed better, later on, by replacing the original voice with another – a much more interesting use of such footage, and more befitting of the title.

Attenuated Shadows is another highlight. This short film about solvent abuse would have been profoundly disturbing without the new score, but the music here goes really well indeed – mournful chords and woozy soundscapes add melancholy to the shock value. The footage looks very real, and yet we’re told at the end of the documentary that the children depicted doing glue, did not inhale. This seems hard to believe – were the COI covering their arses for fear of being labeled exploitative? Was the original misinforming us, or has Mordant Music’s emotive scoring misinformed us into believing the illusion? Maybe we’ll never know. This is MISinformation after all.

Urban nightmares are then replaced by grainy pictures of Stone Henge and picture-book illustrations of early man. Ridyll was the weakest section for me. It didn’t feel as though it had been re-purposed as much as the others, and it did drag a little. However, it does benefit from being an interlude, and in contrast with the other more intense offerings, it paints a quaint picture of Britain’s ancient history. And the music is pretty good too, featuring a Moog wig-out in the style of Bo Hansson.

Elsewhere on the DVD we see the famous AIDS advert (from the 80s) in reverse, a suburban domestic version of Tron where nature fights back, a documentary on Ink Jet technology repurposed to reveal something dark in our nature, strange footage of nematode worms in a lab, and many other more abstract pieces, where music and visual mesh perfectly with no apparent agenda or message to be conveyed. The last film is pure audio-visual pleasure, as beautiful images of the sea and coastline are immaculately scored – the sound and picture relationship here is more precise than anywhere else in the work, with beautiful rhythmic editing and a sense of humour to boot.

In conclusion then, I simply can’t recommend this DVD enough – it is a work of art with very few aspects in need of criticism. It is both thought-provoking, emotive and intelligently complied. What I would say though, is that it is best viewed instinctively, on psychotropics, so your own imagination becomes part of the work, and you get lost in the minutae and subtle inter-relationships that jump-start old memories and lateral ideas. You get lost in it happily. Watched in a sober, more linear fashion, you end up trying to second-guess the creator’s motivations, and I don’t think you get quite as much out of it that way.

Best served with 3.5 grams of “Blue Cheese”.

You can buy the DVD from Boomkat

Cryptomnesia by Micoland

New track by Red Eye contributor Micoland.

Graffic Equalisers Compilation

Beta Birmingham, a new record label based in the midlands, has launched with an awesome compilation of wayward glitch-hop, drumstep and bass-heavy craziness called Graffic Equalisers. The album was released today on CD and digitally through Addictech and can be bought through the label for only 3 pounds sterling!

“Beta are proud to present our widely anticipated debut album ‘Graffic Equalisers’, 10 tracks of bass-heavy dancefloor dubs and next generation sub synthesis from the Midlands elite electronic producers. Graffic Equalisers’ weilds a furious artilliary of glitch hop, dubstep and drum and bass, AVAILABLE NOW! both digitally and as a limited edition CD. ‘Graffic Equalisers’ can be found at independent music retailers nationwide, however, it is also available directly from us for only £3 + p & p Visit http://www.betabirmingham.co.uk for more info!”

The compilation also features a track by Red Eye contributors Wobble N Dubb. Destroying Grandma’s House is one of their best tracks to date and is probably worth the asking price alone! Graffic Equalisers has only been available for several hours and Destroying Grandma’s House has already been remixed  – check it out below:::

http://www.betabirmingham.co.uk/

WOBBLE N DUBB – DESTROYING GRANDMAS HOUSE (GROOVEMERCHANT CAKE MIX) by the yardbird

Wobble n Dubb – It’s Not Rocket Surgery [Review]

I’ve never been raped in either of my ears, but I imagine that the sensation would not be dissimilar to that of listening to the merciless new album from Wobble n Dubb. The duo’s debut album, a bass-heavy Techno hybrid called It’s Not Rocket Surgery, demands to be played loud: loud enough to make you think the room you’re in is the only piece of horrific reality left in existence, and everything outside has disappeared into the abyss. It will pulverise the soft tissue of your inner ear and maul at your ear drum to the point of near collapse; it will melt a fuse in your brain and trap you in a dark acid flashback of mental psychosis… It’s not for pussies, I’m for real.

The intro, Brain Science, sets the psychotic pace of the album. Wobble N Dubb ain’t messin’. The Godfathers of Ravecore have returned and they mean serious deviant mash-up business. The album starts for real with the pummelling rhythm of Kokoro’s Actroid pulling you into a futuristic nightmare realm of androids and robots, where the sublimely heavy kick-drums batter out the pace of a revolution. The epic Holy Shiite comes next, a track which not only gives you an insight into Wobble n Dubb’s troublesome sense of humour, it also shows them at the top of their game: eerie and unsettling glitched-out vocals mesh perfectly with pounding drums and a crushing bassline; every second is immaculately and painstakingly produced.

Full of blistering snares and nervous sounding bass, Shifty is just that: the theme tune to a man skulking away down an alley after indecently exposing himself to a schoolboy. The dirty bastard. Then comes the hammering bassline of Propa Wood, thrashing out the soundtrack to an imaginary scene in an imaginary documentary in which David Cameron gets ripped apart limb from limb by a naked midget with a tin opener, and screams of anguish erupt from his posh twat-hole of a mouth as his ridiculously annoying face gets sprayed with lumps of bile-soaked cartilage and chunks of bloody gristle. But that might just be me.

Wobble n Dubb – Propa Wood

The aptly titled Loud is a highlight – its unearthly sci-fi melody fuses immaculately with a thundering signature Wobble n Dubb bassline, and it morphs into a destructive and fierce rave anthem. Monstrously heavy Seppuku is a summoning to watch a ritual suicide by disembowelment – the wobbling bass takes prime position again, ripping apart your ear canal without so much as a bit of courtesy spit to ease the pain. Deal with it or fuck off, it seems to say. Gonzo throws you into a brutal Gabber insanity of thrashing spastics; but then Front Gammon pulls you back out with a jolly little melody, and makes you feel like you’ve landed in the middle of a rave down a rabbit hole with a clarted Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee ripping up the dance floor.

The atmospheric and dreamy Tiny Dinosaur Hands brings this demented album to a close in a way that’s actually verging on serene. Maybe Wobble N Dubb aren’t complete savages after all – they have at least had the decency to attempt to calm our troubled minds at the end of this psychotic saga that has been It’s Not Rocket Surgery.

But I do think it’s time for them to fuck off now. Don’t you?

Get the album NOW (at your peril) from Dead Channel
Wobble N Dubb on Soundcloud / Facebook
Check out The Wobble n Dubb takeover on The Otherside Radio show back in January 2011: download here.

Urban Exploration

Music from Saturn, Brighton and Leeds.